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C00002 00002		It is convenient to divide work in computer vision into
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	It is convenient to divide work in computer vision into
scientific work and work in basic technology.  Scientific work is
aimed at getting certain knowledge and basic technological work
is aimed at getting certain kinds of capability independently of
how this capability may be applied.  In the field of computer vision,
as in artificial intelligence generally, these efforts are
intertwined, and researchers are often not clear as to which
goal dominates in their work.


KNOWLEDGE

	In computer vision, the main scientific questions are the following:

	1. What kinds of information about the world are
available through vision?  Clearly only partial information about
a person is available from vision when you see him seated behind
a desk.  When you see a machine at a distance even less information
is available.

	2. What information about the world can be assumed and combined
with direct vision information to get information about three dimensional
objects?  What are the logical laws that determine what can be legitimately
inferred or conjectured?

	3. What is it reasonable to try to know about an object and how
can this information be represented in the memory of a computer?  Clearly
this is different for a machine part whose complete shape is often
determinable and necessary and a tree or hair where it is impossible
and unnecessary to determine the location of each individual hair or
leaf.  But note that a barber or tree surgeon while not keeping in mind
the location of all hairs or branches, has requires temporary information
about particular hairs or branches in order to do the next step of his
work.

	4. What information about a scene comes from the different visual
characteristics?  What redundancy is there?  By what rules can the different
cues be combined legitimately to give information about a scene?  The kinds
of information that have been considered include brightness and brightness
edges, color and color edges, texture and regions grown by combining
small regions of homogeneous texture, the distance as measured by
range finders or by the parallax of two views together with parallax
edges.  Recently there as been a lot of work on so-called top-down
approaches where a lot of information about what objects may be presumed
to be is used to interpret lower level information.  Thus if an
object was presumed to be a human, two and not more arms must be
accounted for.


CAPABILITY

	The main capabilities computer vision research is working towards
are the following:

	1. The ability to find objects such as persons, vehicles, or
machine parts in a complex environment and to determine the attitudes of
the objects found.  Thus we not only need to find the vehicles in a scene
but we also need to know which way they are going.  Machine parts must be
located oriented so that manipulators can pick them up.

	2. The ability to give a description of a scene that is complete
with regard to those aspects relevant to a certain task.


APPLICATIONS

	Computer vision has many potential applications including some of
special interest to the Department of Defense.